Refresh Refresh

by Benjamin Percy

  And then together they work on skinning the deer, boning and quartering it while Jim explains how they will roll some of the meat in salt and marinate some of it in honey mustard and take some of it to the smokehouse to lie on a grill with cherry wood chips smoldering under it, soaking the meat with their heavy tang.

  All this time a funnel of vultures swirls overhead. Their shadows play across the meadow like a dark rippling water.

  His daughter, Anne, lives in Salem, in the Willamette Valley, on the other side of the Cascades, where it rains more days than not and moss clings to the trees like a soft green armor. Compared to Central Oregon, it is another world entirely, so moist and gray, the sky, the sidewalks, as if you could punch your hand through anything and withdraw a handful of squirming worms.

  He keeps a photo of her on the mantel. In it she holds a rainbow trout, toward the camera to make it look bigger, her thumb hooked through its gills. The sun is before her, making her squint, but he can see happiness in her crumpled-up expression.

  She was the same age as Cody then, and he prefers to think of her like that: talking to dolls; stuffing her feet into pink rubber boots; wading through waist-high clusters of rabbit­brush and pausing now and then to collect something, a black-tipped feather, an arrowhead, an owl pellet busy with fur and bones.

  Now she is living with some new man in a double-wide trailer on the Sandy River. There have been many before him, all of them with mustaches and Chevy trucks and sleeveless T-shirts that show off the barbed-wire tattoos that surround the hard bulge of their muscles. His name is Dwayne. All that Jim knows of him is this: he works on a landscaping crew and plays in a band called Poison Monkey and occasionally makes his hands into fists and strikes Anne.

  That is why two weeks ago the boy came to live with him.

  Jim has lived alone for nearly eight years. He remembers the day Anne left him. He watched her from the porch as she navigated the long cinder driveway. It was mid­morning and the sun flamed at the tops of the trees and clouds scudded across the sky, throwing shadows on the ground.

  Just before she turned onto the potholed strip of county two-lane, she reached her hand out the window and gave a wave good-bye. Jim copied the gesture and maintained it long after she vanished from sight, on her way to the Willamette Pass, headed up and over the mountains, to Corvallis, where she attended OSU for two years until she got pregnant, dropped out, and moved into a studio apartment above a sports bar with a man named Christopher—a man with yellow hair and a too-big mouth—a man distinguished from the faceless lineup in Jim’s mind only because he was the first to betray her.

  Then, when she drove away with her pale hand out the window, he felt a cavity opening inside him, as though a sharp long-handled spoon had reached down his throat and carved him out. The sensation was not wholly unfamiliar to him.

  Several years before, his wife had left him for the vice principal of Mountain View High, where she then taught English. With him she moved to California, a state Jim now hates with the same sort of illogic that informs hating dogs because a Doberman once bit you.

  For her, Betty, he had also stood on the porch. He had watched their old Ram Charger retreat from him, its tires kicking up red dust. But his hand had not risen then, as it did for his daughter, to say so long, good luck. It had remained in his pocket, balled into a fist, his fingernails digging into his palm and leaving behind red crescents.

  He prefers not to think of her, his wife. Every once in a while, deep in the night, he’ll imagine the taste of her mouth, the way her body arched against his. But mostly her memory is like a tombstone whose inscription has become vague from lichen and frost, a half-remembered someone he refuses to mourn.

  Now his home—a single-story ranch with earth-colored siding and basalt stonework along its base—has life in it again. Here is the boy. His face is like his mother’s, only more compact, softer. He looks like she used to look, during those years when Jim would so often cradle her in his arms and thumb the tears from her eyes after she fell and peeled, like a red peel of apple, the skin off her knee.

  Her room is as she left it. Dozens of glow-in-the-dark stars decorate the ceiling. Photographs scissored from Cos­mopolitan hang from the closet door. The colored bulb of a sock rests on top of her dresser, among many half-empty perfume bottles with names like Fantasy and Revenge. Every few months Jim will vacuum or dust, usually before one of her visits, but otherwise the room remains undisturbed. This is where the boy sleeps, under a glow-in-the-dark constellation that reminds Jim of a phantom net that might descend at any moment and keep the boy here, safe.

  Since the boy moved in, he has not cried for his mother or sat mindlessly before the television or followed Jim around, begging for attention, as Jim expected he would. Mainly he wanders through the forest, making pyramids out of stones, pretending pinecones are grenades, notching the trunks of trees with a found arrowhead, flushing out quail and firing pebbles at them with the slingshot Jim gave him.

  He is so quiet and so often off on his own that Jim occasionally forgets about him. On one occasion, in the kitchen, he turned around from the fridge and dropped a gallon of milk, startled by the sight of the boy. Jim felt then—off-balance, alarmed—as he sometimes felt when his daughter called and announced she had met or had left somebody.

  Right then, with the milk overturned and gurgling all over the slate floor, Jim looked at the boy looking up at him and studied his face as if it might hold some clue to the person that his daughter has become.

  Next to his house stands a pole barn, his taxidermy studio. There are no windows, but on warm days he leaves its double-doors yawned open, to let in the breeze and blow out the biting smell of formaldehyde.

  Hundreds of mouths line the walls, some with jaws gaped, clenched, snarling, howling. Above them hang a bobcat on a stump, the head of an elk, a buck, a big-horned sheep, the trophy fish he pulled from the Deschutes River—rainbow trout and Coho salmon mostly—their bodies lacquered, frozen in postures of defiance, struggling against imaginary hooks.

  Sometimes, when Jim is hunched over a carcass—sewing up its middle or tucking its lips or repairing its skull plate—the boy will come into the barn. He will study the way Jim neatens a fold of fur and runs a needle and thread through it. And then he will go on to explore the stainless-steel counters and industrial sinks, the mounting stands and arm sockets, the tanning machine, the drawers full of scissors and scalpels and pinning needles and fleshing tools and hook scrapers and water-resistant ID tags. He will open up the wooden cabinet where Jim stores the Duo-fast electric stapler and the HVLP blower. He will count the jugs of formaldehyde and the boxes of latex gloves crowded under the counters. And he will go to the back of the barn and wander through the maze of plywood shelves. Here, in tidy rows marching in every direction, are polyurethane figures labeled as mule deer, elk, pine marten, foxes, grouse, quail, German shepherds, Maltese, all of them looking so naked and horrible. Then there are the prosthetic parts, such as tails, glass eyes, arranged by species. At the back of the studio an insulated door opens with a moaning blast into a small walk-in refrigerator that opens up again into a large walk-in freezer stacked floor-to-ceiling with carcasses—about fifty birds, maybe twenty deer, some of them bound and wrapped and tagged for as long as a year before the skin-stuffing process can begin.

  It’s here where he keeps the foot.

  One night in ’Nam, so long ago now, when he was on a week’s stand-down at Chu Lai, he was walking around in bamboo sandals, walking to the radio relay to make a call, when he stepped on a nail that went through his sandal and into his heel. It wasn’t a deep wound, but it was deep enough. It got infected. Everything over there got infected. It was the humidity that did it.

  He didn’t get it treated. There were men taking bullets to the stomach and going yellow from malaria. The war was all around him and more often than not the air seemed to shake from artillery shells exploding in the distance. He couldn’t complain about stepping on a
nail. But then blackness began to creep through his veins and his fever clocked in at a hundred and seven. His foot looked like the foot of a corpse and the rest of him was catching up. So they sawed it off of him, like a cancer, before it took him over.

  And he kept it. He keeps it to this day, stored it in a sealed bucket of formaldehyde. When people ask him why, he says, “I wanted it. It’s me, you know. It’s mine. It’s not like a nail clipping or a clump of hair. It’s my foot.”

  He supposes it is his way of never growing old, of living forever, suspending his foot in formaldehyde like a bee trapped in amber.

  The foot fascinates the boy. He often asks to see it and when he does Jim will take a break from whatever he is doing and drag out the bucket and peel away the lid. They will peer into its pungent waters and see the foot—hairless, maggot white—floating there with a bit of bone poking from its ankle.

  Jim keeps a thirty-pack of Coors in the walk-in fridge and he helps himself to one now, as the boy huddles over the bucket with his hands braced on his knees. Jim joins him there. Their faces reflect off the surface of the formaldehyde, Jim’s sliding away now and then to sip from his beer. Its coldness brings a warmth to his belly, and along with it, a sort of sentimental sort of fuzzy feeling. He somehow gets the idea that the foot looks horribly alone, trapped in the big white bucket. When he finishes the beer, rather than crush the empty, he tosses it into the bucket. He snorts, maybe with amusement or sadness or a little of both, when the can slowly fills with formaldehyde and sinks to the bottom. And when the boy looks up at him with a puzzled expression, Jim doesn’t really know what to say. “It’s evolving,” he finally says. “Stuff will go in, stuff will come out. It’ll be representative.” Like some kind of art. “Got anything you’d like to add?”

  The boy considers the question very seriously. His eyebrows come together in concentration and his hands root around in his pockets. From them he withdraws some coins and an agate and a porcupine quill and an arrowhead and a ball of lint. None of this seems to his liking. Then his face brightens and he flees the barn and returns a minute later with the framed photograph of Anne, the one where she holds the trout up to the camera. Jim nods his approval.

  In it goes.

  When Jim gave the boy the slingshot—a Wrist-Rocket purchased at Bi-Mart—he knew it was only a matter of time before the boy killed something.

  Today Jim is on the porch, rocking in a rocking chair. He has a Pendleton blanket wrapped around him and his breath rises from his mouth in little vapor clouds. From the rafters hang a dozen wind chimes he fashioned from the bones of cats. They rattle against the cold breeze that carries in it the aspirin smell of snow. Nearby, steps lead down the porch to a pea-gravel path. To either side of the path spreads a rose garden, a thorny tangle, browned and shriveled from the first frost. To keep the deer away he fences in the garden with the thighbones of elk and bear, their color the gray-white of the cottonwoods that wall off the western edge of the meadow.

  Right now the boy marches out of the cottonwoods. Leaves, like gold coins, snow around him. With the slingshot tucked into the waist of his jeans he continues across the thirty yards of cheat­grass and along the gravel path and up the porch steps to stand before Jim in his rocking chair. All this time the boy keeps his right hand behind his back. It isn’t until Jim says, “What have you got there?” that he reveals his prize. From his hand, upside down and gripped by its hind leg, dangles a dead chipmunk. A bubble of blood grows out of its mouth, and pops.

  “Did you kill that?” Jim asks.

  The boy admits he did, his smile failing a little.

  With the blanket still around him Jim rises from the rocker and it rocks back and strikes the side of the house. “Then you’re going to eat it.”

  Upon hearing this, the boy releases the chipmunk in surprise. It falls to the porch with a plop. Its posture is that of a dreaming dog, laid out on its side before a hot stove.

  There is a leaf in the boy’s hair, a cottonwood leaf, golden with November. Jim brushes it away and tells the boy to pick the chipmunk up and to follow him.

  Together they walk through the living room and into the kitchen. Here Jim shrugs off the blanket and throws it over a chair. From a drawer he removes a stencil blade and tells the boy to lay down the chipmunk on the butcher block.

  He shows the boy how to strip its tiny pelt until it is naked and slick, an infant pink. Together they gut it and bone it and dice up its meat to fry in oil and season with garlic and black pepper. They put it on a plate with a healthy splatter of ketchup and take their seats at the table. With his fork Jim stabs a piece of meat that looks a little like a rubber band, but doesn’t eat it. “Do you think we ought to say grace?” he says.

  The boy looks at him blankly.

  Jim has not prayed in years, not since Anne was a child. His wife had insisted upon it then. But when she moved out she took the habit with her. He does not know why the notion comes to him now, but it does, and it seems right. “I think we ought to. Do you know how?”

  The boy brings his hands together, making them into a steeple. He looks to Jim for approval.

  “That’s right. That’s exactly how it’s done. Now close your eyes and bow your head and think about all the things you’re thankful for.”

  The boy scrunches his eyes shut. His fingers lace together and the steeple collapses into a white-knuckled sort of fist. And Jim cannot help but wonder what the boy is thinking.

  “This is the prayer your mother used to say when she was a little girl. I think it’s a pretty good one. It goes like this.” Jim closes his eyes and sings in an uncertain tenor, “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let this food to us be blessed.”

  The sound of his voice in song surprises him and he opens his eyes and sees that the boy has brought his hands to his forehead, his hands joined so tightly together they tremble.

  “Can you remember that?” Jim says. “Let’s try to sing it together this time.”

  And they do.

  Later that night Anne calls just as Jim begins brushing his teeth. At the sound of the first ring he spits a blue oyster in the sink and hobbles to the phone and brings it to his ear. He can feel the minty grit of toothpaste, like sand, against his teeth and gums, when she tells him, between damp shuddering breaths, what has happened.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do,” repeating this over and over until the words blur together, becoming only series of sounds.

  Her boyfriend Dwayne has been drinking whiskey. There is something about whiskey, the way its brownness works through him and brings a wild blistering heat to his temper. A few minutes ago he worked his knuckles across her face until she bled from many places. Now he is outside with a bottle in one hand and a shotgun in the other. He is trying to blast the moon from its black place in the sky and the birdshot is hissing down on the trailer roof and Anne, for the life of her, doesn’t know what to do.

  Jim tells her to call the police, and when she says she can’t—it will only make things worse—he tells her to leave, to come home, and when she says nothing he says it again—“Come home.”—and then again, until she begins to stuff her clothes into a duffel bag.

  Then his daughter says, “Oh no.”

  And Jim feels his heart clench when he realizes what he hears: a door slamming shut, footsteps clomping across linoleum, the quickened pace of his daughter’s breathing.

  There is a rumbling sound—a voice—that sounds like a chair dragged harshly across hardwood, and in response to it his daughter screams, “You bastard, you asshole, you son of a bitch!”

  And Jim continues to listen—to the screaming, the noise of furniture turning over, glass shattering—until the receiver is at last set harshly in its cradle and not for the first time Jim feels that she has gone someplace where he cannot follow.

  After midnight, from the living room, with a mug of coffee steaming in his hand, Jim watches headlights appear at the
end of his driveway. They grow brighter in their approach. This is his daughter. She is driving the same car she was driving when she left him at eighteen—a rusted-out Cavalier he found listed in the Bend Bulletin for two grand. Now she parks it before the garage and clicks on the dome light. He can see her, surrounded by a weak yellow light. She adjusts the rearview mirror and observes her reflection and takes out her compact and reapplies some foundation.

  Even from here, even under all that makeup, her eyes are blackened hollows and her face appears sunken, rotten, as if there is already something dead about her.

  She gets out of the car and climbs up the porch and Jim opens the door and they look at each other for a long minute. One of her eyes is swollen completely shut. An eggplant purple reaches up her nose. Her upper lip looks like someone took a syringe full of water to it. Looking at her, he feels something inside him stir and roll over, like a log with a rotted underside spotted with pale and squirming grubs. He feels the simultaneous urge to hug her and to yell at her for being such a fool, for getting herself into situation after ­situation.

  Before he can act on either, she says more or less the same thing she said two weeks ago, and two weeks before that, her words as predictable as the creeping progress of autumn, the failing light, the changing shade of the leaves, the cold winds that come howling down from the mountains.

  “He was in a rare mood,” she says, her voice dampened as if run through wet cotton. “But I talked to him—I just talked to him on my cell phone actually—and he’s better now. He’s sorry. He feels really terrible.” As if all that rage and drunkenness, burned away like mist under the sun, never existed at all.